VALERIY GRACHOV

 

Press release

 

Valeriy Grachov was born in Arkhangelsk, Russia in a family of a military man. The childhood also passed there. The smell of a thawed snow became dominating accent of his emotional constitution, at that time he started to draw seriously a lot. His mum joked, that she had not mentioned what he started to do earlier - draw than speak or ski than walk. Often crossings with family accustomed him to a nomadic life.

He graduated from architectural faculty of Engineering and Construction Institute in Kiev. After postgraduate study, understood that painting and only painting was his calling. Before that he seriouly dreamt of realizing in sculpture and music, in architecture and design. After first "walk" to Crimea the first mountain landscape came out. It was deeply imbued with energy of Tadjik Pamirs. That place later became his second native land. Everything that he came across and saw splashed out on canvases. That was an epopee of more than three decades.

Valeriy Grachov’s art style can be expressed, as synthesis of Russian romantic realism (Polenov, Levitan) and Chinese medieval painting. In his youth the understanding of absolute unity of life had formed, and later it got conceptual acknowledgement in studying philosophy and different religions.

The person with uneasy destiny, who absorbed energy of mountains, truly and naturally presents so accessibly and clearly a miracle of the Earth - mountains. The miracle, which powerfully forms spirit and will of an individual.

These are pictures of a condition. A silent cool blows from "windows - pictures" where mountains seem such close and attracting, and still remain eternally cold and unapproachable...

Recently even the manner of the painting has became east, short, just a stroke, in a full concentration. Thus “variants on a theme” appear. Work is done once, forever and without repetitions. Touching watercolors with views of Truhanov Island and flowers, white clouds and a snow of Finland, and rigid unapproachable mountains are incredibly contrastly rendereded in distemper and oil live in his workshop. As an individual, Grachov represents same "mix", the person with Slavic mentality and Eastern outlook. An incredible contrast in painting, outlook and a life.

 

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